I am absolutely, everyday, head over heels in love with my job and I’m more than happy to be known as “that girl who teaches yoga.” Now, I am confronted with the “essential transience” of all things. Who am I when I’m not being a yoga teacher? How will I be able to go back to my teaching practice? Will I be able to save money? All these questions and more are giving me pre-trip anxiety.

Obviously, as you’ll see from the title of this post, I haven’t been a Life Coach for very long… which is precisely the reason why I just had to write this post.

I’ve only been a life coach for approximately six months and in that short time, I’ve learned so much about people, it’s insane. I have no ambitions of entertaining the idea that I’m expert, nor that I already know exactly what I’m doing either 😉 I’m just doing my best. I can say thought that I feel like very slowly but surely, my views on the world before me are changing.

So what have I learned as someone whose job it is to truly, actively listen to people? I’m so excited to share it with you.

People have been asking me what my Bali experience was like, what I did and what I learned. It’s a bit hard to encapsulate but I’ve tried to do even a little bit of it and I came up with this manifesto: Life is shit… Change is hard… We are the problem… We must give up… So please, please shut up…

And before you start agreeing with me and nodding your head, please read on 🙂

So… I had been talking about my going here loads and loads before I actually arrived. In the month before my flight I probably said the words “Bali Silent Retreat” at least thrice or four times every week – and even before then, I said it to myself as part of my work of manifestation.

So it’s a bit funny for me to share that, the reality of the silence only really dawned on me once I stepped foot onto the grounds. And damn, it was an overwhelming dawning.

I’m sitting here in our little teachers’ living space which is a talk-safe, device-safe zone. In a bit, I’ll be walking to the retreat grounds to prepare for my class and practice beforehand. It’s less than 3 minutes walk but the spaces feel like different countries – and in the smallest ways.

On the retreat grounds of Bali Silent Retreat (BSR), there is absolutely no talking.

Half a day into settling in to our beautiful home, and a few minutes of having a notebook open in my lap I remembered why I had insisted to be here – to declutter. Surely, a huge task.

I looked up and saw a dark cloud embedded in a sea of white. It was at the forefront, looking thick and alive with rain. It was just… so out of place that it took me to the real present, where I am now constantly being reminded me of painful memories. It felt like a sign to dive into things I had happily left behind. “Go back for it.” There are so many of them, so many I’ve never shared and don’t care to come back to at all. But, to remove an unsightly dark cloud, you need to allow it to rain, let it bless the earth underneath and reunite it to the cycle of life.

There are so many of the sad stories, so many I’ve never shared and don’t care to come back to at all. But, to remove an unsightly dark cloud, you need to allow it to rain, let it bless the earth underneath and reunite it to the cycle of life.

I’m writing about pain because today was a tough day, so I might as well go all the way.

Writing about love, light, purpose, path – that shit is easy and it always feels like it writes itself. On the opposite side of the spectrum, pain in any form or manner is far from eloquent. Pain steals your words away, demanding you to feel, feel, feel. Without meaning to, it steals you away from the present – it’s just too big and ungraceful that it can’t help but overpower every single moment. Pain is like a kid who doesn’t know his own strength.

As I write this, I recognize that the light in me is still and always fighting valiantly. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even be brave enough to own this time and write about it. This is something I am so eternally grateful for, the strength to ungracefully cling to light with a fury.

I knew teaching yoga was something I wanted to do, in a different way than anything I’ve ever wanted to do before.

It may not have been obvious to anyone and it definitely wasn’t obvious to me but, up until that point, I was actually living on a weird kind of autopilot. As teacher training went on, suddenly I remembered what it felt like to have goals, to have something that I genuinely wanted to work towards. Woah. It was a “WOAAAH” kind of feeling and I would say it’s a lot like waking up. It’s hard to keep on describing but for sure, it was a state of hopeful being I wanted to hold on to and so I gave myself a year to see if there was any way I could build a life out of this exhilaration – regardless of disastrous failure and possibly wasting 365 days.

I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts and wrap my head around the fact that… it’s all happening. Despite my fears and the constant anxiety that’s been my companion this June, my life is moving forward.

The plan was to get a teaching job in a studio by the time I got back from Myanmar and when I landed late May, this whole idea was still ridiculous to me. Yes I learned a lot at Bahay Kalipay and my teaching changed enormously but still… Wah.

I suppose to an outsider looking in, once you get your teacher training the natural process is that you immediately start teaching in a studio and live happily ever after in yoga bliss. The reality is, it requires a little more hustle than that.

It’s an easy enough, three word question that has stumped the hell out of me.

Most people will expect an answer that includes toned arms, incredible flexibility, peace of mind, or some combination of all of that. Yes, those are definitely valid reasons why and I’ll eventually write about all that scientific stuff but today, I’ll say, it’s more.

The fact that I’m a new instructor and I struggle to put into words what yoga means to me bothered me, so I soaked in it. And I ended up with this age-old adage from the Rolling Stones, “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you just might find you get what you need.”